


pay for the sins i create

by jeannedarc



Series: the body, the blood, the machine [1]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Blood, Emetophobia, Human Sacrifice, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Murder, Old Gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:07:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27692540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: 'How would you like to get revenge on the man who murdered you?'Mark smiled. The dirt in the sill stirred all on its own. The air smelled of flour and flowers and decay.Yes. Today felt like a good day for vengeance.
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Lee Donghyuck | Haechan, Kim Jungwoo/Mark Lee (NCT)
Series: the body, the blood, the machine [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025803
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40
Collections: NCT Bigbang Round 1





	pay for the sins i create

**Author's Note:**

> thank you SO MUCH to [anne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae) ([twitter](http://twitter.com/speckledsolana)) for holding my hand, accidentally becoming my de facto beta, and generally working with me when i had no idea what kind of thing i wanted to create, only that i wanted to create  
> thank you more to elle, love of my life, star of my heart, the one person who said i was okay to do as i wanted

The people standing in line at the boulangerie down the way would hear the screams as they spilled from the open window. 

It was a stark realisation that hit him as he stood there, watching the people shuffle forward, their wallets in hand and their hats tucked tight over their perfectly-coiffed hair. Jaehyun didn't find it in himself to care. He could hear the titters of conversation from the street below, wafting up on the breeze. His ears pricked, straining to catch the words. His head wasn't quite attuned to French like he'd have liked. 

A pity, really, since he’d be leaving soon. He did so like to leave a world smarter than he’d been upon entering it.

From the floor, his new friend made a quavering sound. Distress. That would not do. He left his spot at the windowsill, dragging his fingers through the dirt he had laid across its painted surface to prepare for the ritual. 

He stooped. He smiled. He cradled the quivering jaw of the man who was going to die for him today. 'Are you afraid?' he asked, keeping even. The linoleum squeaked beneath his dress shoes; a wing tip toe dug into a bare shin. 

His sacrifice strained at his bonds. His eyes, which had held multitudes when they'd met at the club just a few short weeks ago, shone with tears. A shame to crush something so pretty, so earthly delicate beneath his heel. But it had to be done. Jaehyun had to go home.

From his pocket he pulled the flowers, tied up in a tiny canvas sachet. He drew the gag from his sacrifice's mouth. 'Open wide,' he said, so soft and so thin that it shivered as it hung in the air between them. 

His friend, the man who would save his life, threw back his head and screamed in a raw voice, heavy with tears. 

If Jaehyun had known he'd sound this pretty crying and pleading for his life, he'd have picked someone else.

One by one, he slipped the ruined lily petals between his friend's lips. He gagged on more than a few, tried to spit them out, forcing Jaehyun to hold his mouth shut. rivulets of saliva, mottled with blood, traipsed down the corners of his mouth. he gagged again. his cheeks paled. He swallowed and the sound was harsh, ragged.

When his mouth was full, and the deed was done, Jaehyun put the gag back in place. He took his spot at the windowsill once more.

The dirt had been disturbed. not by him. He stared at it curiously. He thought he heard whispers above the inane chit chat that drifted up to meet his waiting ear.

' _You will never get home this way_ ,' the gods promised, their chorus sickly as it spun through his head.

Jaehyun didn't care much for disembodied voices, either.

Into his sleeve he coughed flowers and stems that matched his murder weapon. He pocketed those for later. 

For now he slumped against the sill, tracing the name of his destination between flecks of soil as they spread themselves apart, so slow and deliberate he almost didn't notice. behind him, a man's piteous wails changed to moans of pain.

Jaehyun smiled. 'Almost home,' he thought.

From the cobbled streets someone called up to him. He waved, and practised his vocabulary in casual conversation, his grammar stilted but his tone convivial nonetheless. if anyone heard the violent thrashing, the wet, heaving coughs he knew were marked with crimson, they said nothing.

He stayed like this a long while. He ignored the sounds of useless vomiting as his friend tried to save himself from imminent death. The room filled with the smell of bile and dirt and fear. It didn't matter what this man did to survive. The deed was already done.

When at last Jaehyun was sure his sacrifice had succumbed he scooped a handful of dirt from the sill. He poured it bit by bit into a slack mouth, now devoid of the cloth that had bound him to his fate. 

Soon the lilies would grow. He hummed as he went about his work. 

He took a fresh, clean razor blade from behind his ear, removed the safety, pressed it into the man's palm. Then he dripped dead and dying blood into his own hand, cupped and waiting and caked with dirt.

Home was so close he could taste it.

He left the body where it lay, undisturbed, save for the closing of his eyes. He deserved the dignity of not watching someone haul him away. 

'Good friends would die for one another,' he whispered as he kissed the place where the man's brow had always knotted before. Then Jaehyun crossed the bare apartment, approaching the locked door. He smeared his crusty palm against the paneling. 

The lock sang a song he knew well when it turned all on its own. He sang along with it.

When he pushed it open, he stepped past the expectation of a hallway in a French apartment building, and into the sunlight. 

He was free.

\---

Back in the apartment, several hours later, a body twitched its way back to life.

The man coughed. Dirt spilled freely from his lips. He heard conversation gentling through the open window.

'Mark,' said a voice he did not know.

He would jump out of his skin if he could. He raised his aching head. He glanced around and was met with a serious man: furrowed brow, business suit, hair meticulously manicured so that the line of it caressed his jaw. 

'That's me,' Mark croaked, only halfway recognising what he was saying to be true.

The man folded his arms. lifted his head. offered a half-hearted grin.

'I'm Johnny,' he said, in an accent that intrigued Mark more than the fact that he had been dead but a moment prior; it breathed familiarity, though Mark had not met this man once in his twenty-two years. Straight to the punch, Johnny continued: 'How would you like to get revenge on the man who murdered you?'

Mark smiled. The dirt in the sill stirred all on its own. The air smelled of flour and flowers and decay.

Yes. Today felt like a good day for vengeance.

\---

Vengeance was not a quickly-attained goal, Mark Lee was dismayed to discover.

As it turned out, the boulangerie had the freshest croissants Mark had eaten since arriving here in the southeast of France not but a month before. He was starving and his mouth still tasted like damp earth. He stared at the accent wall just to the right of the service counter, a soft shade of coral that brought him no calm but transfixed him nonetheless. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the subtle strumming of a guitar, and his fingers itched to play though he hadn't so much as owned a single instrument in years.

He drank water like he was trying to drown himself.

Johnny, despite his apparent seriousness, wrinkled around the edges like a good dollar bill as he watched Mark drink an entire pitcher of chilled water, glass after glass. 'Don't die again,' he said, half-joking and leaning back in his chair.

Mark ignored that. He drank until he was sated, until he couldn't taste poison or stomach acid or dry lips that had struggled to gasp for air not even a half-day prior. He shifted in his seat constantly, resisting the urge to actively fidget. something nudged at him from his back pocket. He wondered, briefly, what that was.

'How do you know someone killed me?' he asked, suspicious, a little knot between his brows. He rested his hands on the table, nearly knocked over the tiny plate that had held his posthumous snack. 

Johnny hummed around the answer to this for a while. 'Because I've known Jaehyun for a long time.'

Mark did not care to think of the implications of that. 'He didn't tell me that was his name,' he said instead. 'Is that really his name?' He focused an intense gaze on Johnny's face, studying him. As if doing so long enough could reveal some hidden truth neither of them could possibly know.

‘It is and isn't,' Johnny said. 'Listen, you aren't the first person he's done this to. but I hope--' and here, Johnny reached into his jacket (a light thing, edged in gold) and, seemingly from nowhere, pulled out an enormous manila folder. it bulged comically at the seams, threatened to unravel fiber by fiber when he slapped it down onto the tabletop. ‘I hope you're going to be the last.'

'What is this?' asked Mark. He wished for more to eat. his stomach rumbled ceaselessly, an echo in a cave with a bottom no one could ever reach. He stretched out his hand for the folder.

Inside were documents. Fairly officious looking ones, at that. Johnny had looked like an officious guy, when he had first entered the site of Mark's untimely murder, but Mark had no way of anticipating...

Wait.

His jaw dropped when he saw his own face there, an old photo torn from the void of the internet and paperclipped to what appeared to be some sort of written profile. 

'Did you know this was going to happen?' he asked Johnny. Flabbergasted, at this point, was an understatement. The coral wall flickered murderous blood-red in his periphery. he did not look away from the line of Johnny's jaw.

At the very least Johnny has the decency to look sheepish. 'Yes and no,' he said, lifting a shoulder until it brushed the curve of his earlobe. 'We knew it _might_ happen. There are...strings.'

'Strings?!' Mark covered his mouth upon receiving glares from several of the patrons in the sleepy bakery. He had never experienced shame at the hands of strangers before, but after death seemed like a good time to start. 'What the fuck is that supposed to mean?'

'It means that seeing the future is an imprecise art.' Suddenly Johnny sounded older than the years he wore on his face. 'It means that you and Jaehyun were meant to meet each other, but not necessarily that he intended to kill you when he met you.'

Mark didn't think that was a very good explanation, but clamped his mouth shut, made it clear he was waiting for more. The tiny, wrought-iron bistro set shook with the force of his knee, bouncing with a need to get out of here, grateful for his life, no need for revenge after all.

'What did he want to do?' Mark bit his bottom lip, redacted his question, held up his hand for pause when Johnny went to answer. 'you still haven't told me who you are.'

'I told you. I'm Johnny.'

'Yeah, but who _are_ you? you sit there and you talk about seeing the future, and about intention, and all that shit, but you haven't told me who you are.' Mark's blood, still replenishing itself, whistled in his ears.

Johnny didn't seem to have an answer for that for a long while. In a decidedly petty act mark ordered a sandwich from a passing server, luxuriant slices of translucent ham, butter and a warm baguette. it was an indulgence. Mark almost managed to feel guilty, but then remembered it was on Johnny's check anyway, since he didn't have much as a half-euro in his paper-thin wallet.

Finally Johnny thought better of lying, or so it seemed. 'I'm a god.'

Mark snorted into his glass of water. A sandwich was placed in front of him. The bread was still steaming. 'So am I.'

'No, really. I’m a god and my job was, in part, to keep Jaehyun from doing what he did to you, and to a lot of people.'

'Hey, you know you do a really shitty job?'

Johnny didn't flinch, only lost a fraction of his easy smile. Mark ignored that in favour of diving into his sandwich. 'If I'm doing a shitty job, then why are you alive again?'

Mark had to give that to him.

'Those files are the people who've been killed to get Jaehyun home,' Johnny continued, glancing out the window of the café. It seemed a difficult thing for him to keep his eyes from Mark's face, even as he devoured his sandwich with the grace of a horse being led to its trough for the first time in a week. 'One every seven years for seventy-seven years, all told.'

Mark turned that over in his mind. He rested the jambon beurre upon its plate. He flickered through the files. 'None of them are me.' _None of them are still alive,_ is what he really meant. _Alive again._ it was a thin-hammered, silver distinction at its very best.

'You're... hm.' Johnny took the sandwich from Mark's plate and took a bite of it himself. He made a noise of praise, then cleared his mouth. Mannerly. Mark thought he might like that. 'You're different than the rest of them.' 

The list of names -- eleven, in total; Mark wondered if there was some significance to the number, if six was simply out of vogue -- stopped, gave way to a profile on Jaehyun himself. It was written in a language that, at first glance, he could not read. He blinked a couple times, and the letters rearranged themselves directly before his eyes.

'I knew I was blind,' he murmured, humbled, 'but not like _that_.'

'We don't really know what it is,' Johnny continued on. Tthe corner of his mouth was pockmarked with crumbs. Mark, never much a fan of mess he didn't make himself, had to physically tuck his hand beneath his thigh to keep from reaching across the table to brush them away. 'We just know that there's something different about you. Probably whoever you used to be in a past life or something.'

Mark glanced down at the table and, realising his sandwich was gone, ordered himself another. 'Who would I have been?'

'Probably someone really good.' Johnny was so good at shrugging, at providing non-answers, that Mark felt the need to give him some sort of congratulatory clap on the back. He curled his fist beneath the tense muscle of his thigh. 'It doesn't matter. I'm not in charge of keeping those records. If you really want to know, I can help you get to the right person, but it has to be after we find Jaehyun.'

'Are we going to kill him?'

'Maybe.' There was hope in Johnny’s eyes.

The second sandwich arrived. Mark's mouth quirked up into something halfway to satisfied. 'Good.'

\---

Iin the sunshine, embraced by a warmth he hadn't felt in a century, Jaehyun found a semblance of peace, of belonging, of home.

The shoreline stretched before him. The ocean crashed against rocks in the distance. Overhead gulls called their song, indicating food to be snatched from the water as it flowed and ebbed and ebbed and flowed. No one spoke, as there was no one there to do so.

A singular place. A singular peace. He breathed, and breathed, and breathed, until salt air thick enough to coat the inside of his mouth consumed him and he had nothing left inside to contradict it. He tipped his head back to let the sunshine kiss his cheeks, and laughed, and smiled like he had something worth smiling for. 

He kicked out of his wing tip shoes. He left them behind, as he did with the jacket he'd worn for coming home, and the pieces of a suit he'd cobbled together with money he didn't technically have, coins coveted after being picked from bodies he'd collected. It didn't matter what he'd worn in the end. What mattered was being home, and being here where the sea could call to him all he wanted without him or anyone else having to heed its siren song. 

The sunset, coming faster than he remembered, pinked and goldened over his right shoulder. Soon there would be only the stars to guide him. He quickened his pace, albeit only a fraction.

Eventually the horizon offered to him a single house, shambling in its sprawl on a hill just past the place where the sand met her unweathered sister, drowning in green overgrowth. It appeared to be breaking down. Odd. His mouth quirked down in a facsimile of disappointment, but he knew that this house was his destination, despite its decrepit brick, its eroding pillars of stone. He crossed the prickling grass in his bare feet, ignoring the gnawing of sand fleas as they clung to the hems of his pant legs. 

The house was different than he remembered. The disrepair had only gotten worse since the last time he'd come home. He could see the plants growing, their arms dangling from broken windows, their antennae wriggling attentively through the lines in the brick. He wondered how much time he had left. If he had any time at all. If he was too late, despite his sacrifices, numbered and not.

The porch crumbled under his first step, opening up its mouth to try and bite into him with jagged teeth. He stared down at the pale, slim column of his ankle, the way he disappeared into a void he could not see. He did not fear injury, nor death. He feared only disappointment. He stepped out of and to the side of the crater he'd made himself, and followed the path of the wraparound, all the way to the north side of the house's exterior.

There, waiting for him, was home, truly. Their knee was drawn up to their chin, and their hair had gotten long and wavy and lighter with the touch of the sun, and every ray of light seemed to be drawn to the planes of their face.

Jaehyun, just for a moment, stopped breathing.

This was everything he had wanted it to be. The gap between them closed, his feet carrying him further than his addled head could comprehend. He stood there before his lover, took their face in his hands. He thumbed over the dark hollows beneath their eyes and held back the tear that threatened to spill from one eye.

They smiled. 'jaehyun.' It was a tender greeting, warm as the sun dipping below the distant skyline. It was one he did not deserve for making them wait so long.

Jaehyun almost did not notice something crooked, something odd about the look on their face. 'Donghyuck,' he said, though his joy did not falter. 'I've come to free you.' His hands moved up the curves of Donghyuck's cheeks, covering his face entirely. As if he couldn't believe the reality of touching their skin again. As if he was dreaming and convinced he would never awaken.

They kissed, and Jaehyun tasted salt in the back of his throat.

'you did it wrong,' said Donghyuck as they pulled away, not moving from their spot in the dilapidated porch swing. They gripped tight at its armrests, and their knuckles turned bloodless as the wood crumbled to dust beneath their grasp. They lifted their chin and flashed a wicked smile, gleaming through the slots in Jaehyun's fingers even as he tried to silence the words sure to leave their mouth. 

'Please forgive me.' Jaehyun did not beg; he simply asked. He was ready to ask a thousand times if it would give him all that he had worked for.

'you did it wrong and they tried to warn you and you didn't listen.'

'What do you mean?' Jaehyun demanded, desperation gritty between his teeth.

But already, Donghyuck's face was slipping out of his grasp, becoming sunbeams all collected in a cloud rather than a solid form. Then they dissipated entirely, and Jaehyun was left struck dumb and staring at the place where their face had been not a moment before. 

The wind slithered into his ear, carrying its sea salt with it in greedy hands. 'try again. do better. don't take too much time.' It sounded so close to Donghyuck's voice that Jaehyun sank to his knees, there on the empty porch.

_try again. do better._

But what else could he do? He didn't have that much time.

Into his hands, which he cupped over his face to save his ego from ruin as if anyone else were around, Jaehyun coughed. The gesture wracked him until all he was and all he had made himself was a pathetic, sobbing mess. He felt movement under his ribs, unnatural yet habit. When he looked down into his palms, an open lily looked back at him, its petal grin mocking.

\---

In an airport, someone listened to a conversation taking place halfway across the world.

'What did you mean, 'we'?'

A smirk in a voice, too confident by far. ‘I thought you wouldn't ask.'

Jungwoo smirked along with the voice, and tucked his phone into the pocket of his carry-on. Soon, he promised himself. Soon he would unravel everything that had wound him up. 

Soon he would meet with his heart.

\---

'So, right,' and Johnny’s hand was splayed across Mark’s bouncing knee. It would be an intimate gesture with anyone else, Mark liable to be knocked over by a stiff breeze more often than not, but with Johnny it just seemed...friendly. Sweet. Like he cared more than he let on. 'The ‘we’ I’m talking about...there’s a few of us with my job. We do different things. I can’t really explain more than that.'

Around them, the bus station bustled, children crying as their parents took them by the hands and led them onto metal-siding buses without so much as saying goodbye. Mark had to admit, he empathised with them, with the way in which their eyes got enormous, the squalling that poured from them at their inadequate means of describing the injustice they were being served. 'What kind of different things?'

Here Johnny smiled, dragged his hand through the knife-sharp cut of his hair. Mark watched it fall, caress his cheek on the way down. There was something unreal about Johnny. It was as if Mark could blink and see too many teeth from the corner of his eye. As his entire leg shook with impatience and uncertainty, he wasn’t sure he would run screaming from the shark mouth of his now only friend. 'I can find people,' he said. 'Anyone in the world, as long as they’re on this planet, I can point to their exact location. Latitude and longitude.'

Mark sniffed. 'That isn’t a very impressive power.' He was hungry again, despite having eaten more jambon beurres before they’d departed the café not but a couple hours before. 'Is that all gods can do? One little thing?'

'If any one of us could do everything, why would there be more than one of us?' Johnny shrugged, and the sharp silver dagger that dangled from his ear jingled, a quiet, steel sound. 'It’s more like, whatever the original form of us did split us up into enough people that we couldn’t be taken out easily.'

A bell dinged overhead. Johnny closed his eyes, seemed to breathe for calm rather than the reflexive action that brought him level with the rest of the mere mortals by whom he was surrounded. Mark realised in a hurry that he wasn’t sure he could count himself among those numbers. 'Is that something that happens often? People trying to take out gods?'

'Have you ever met a religious zealot, Mark?'

It was a gut-punch of a question, Mark sure the breath that had entered Johnny’s lungs as he meditated on the sound of the departure announcements had been ripped straight from his own diaphragm. 'My father was a pastor,' he mumbled. 'But I don’t know about _zealots_ , you know? Everyone in his congregation was pretty...normal.' 

It should have been stranger to him, that he couldn’t remember his father’s denomination, but then, dying probably did that to someone.

Johnny shrugged. 'We’re going to get on this bus, and then we’re going to get on a train, and then we’ll be in England. Is that okay with you?'

'Do I have a choice?' Mark’s sarcasm edged on mean rather than funny. He was looking forward to mildewed bus seats, a headrest, some well-earned sleep. Death, it seemed, had not been enough for him.

Johnny smiled enigmatically. 'Depends on how you believe in gods. Or God. Or fate.'

Mark didn’t know what to say to that. He let himself be ushered to their bus the same way he’d watched so many parents do while sitting there on that metal bench. Johnny was, among other things, a good steward. 

\---

The sky was, unsurprisingly, overcast. Mark stared up into the endless sheet of grey that coated the sky the way salted butter coated his insides and wondered how long he’d have to go without blinking to feel a raindrop catch him right in the cornea. It was good that Johnny was there to tote him along, Mark’s revitalised body some unwanted possession he’d discovered courtesy of a lost-and-found where no one claimed anything. Johnny had thought to bring a coat. Mark had nothing but the clothes on his back. They stole an umbrella from a shopfront when they left the train platform.

Around them, everyone spoke in pleasing lilts, save the occasional Scot who jolted Mark right out of his skin. The conversation was kept to murmurs that built to a dull roar that reminded Mark of the ocean, though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to shore. 'I’m hungry,' said Mark, stretching his arms over his head and revealing a strip of growling stomach to the London chill. 

'You’re going to be hungry for a little while,' said Johnny, like he was the sort of person used to negotiating with terrorists who wanted everything his wallet had to offer. 'Trust me, you’re going to want to wait. If I let you spoil dinner he’ll be really upset.'

'Who?' Mark blinked once, twice, knowing that a third time would dissolve Johnny from his vision entirely. They strode down the street, arm in arm, earning only a couple questioning looks. Johnny was careful in the way he balanced the umbrella’s bell over their heads. 'Seriously, you can’t just tell me half-stories.'

In answer, Johnny flagged down a taxi, which they poured into, damp with humidity. He rattled off an address. 'Aye, going uptown?' Their driver was a man in his late fifties if he was a day, with a trim moustache and slightly-overgrown eyebrows that protruded beyond the thin brim of his hat. 'Where’re ye coming from?'

'Oh, you know,' and here Johnny flashed every charm he had, 'here and there.'

Mark couldn’t understand why that was worthy of a laugh, but heard the nervous sound of his own chuckling as the driver clutched his gut one-handed. 'American?' he asked.

'I’ve lived in America a long time, yeah,' Johnny agreed. 'My friend here is from…'

'Canada,' Mark supplied, hoping that he could feign carsickness by the tight-wound thread of his voice. 'Vancouver. West coast.'

The conversation fell silent after that. Mark tried not to blame it on the awkward crack in his voice that had reared its head at the worst possible time, as per usual. Johnny rested that same hand upon his knee, gave him a comforting squeeze, offered him a sympathetic gaze. _Happens to the best of us,_ he seemed to say. 

In time, the driver dropped them off in front of a row of crooked-tooth houses, bunched together with hardly a breath between them. Mark tried not to be impressed by the architecture; he seemed to remember liking the steeples at churches, the high ceilings, the sheer _vastness_ of them. He cleared his throat as he ascended the five-step stairway that Johnny guided him along; his saliva still tasted of earth, though it had been hours upon hours and quite a bit to eat since then.

Johnny pulled a key from a potted plant, though Mark was loath to ignore the way it seemed to wink into existence rather than from between the dying blossoms. He used that key to unlock the door, and the pair of them slipped inside.

Here, things were not as they appeared on the outside. That same vastness that Mark wanted to think himself a fan of greeted them: a wide foyer, a spiral staircase, marble flooring, a chandelier that twinkled in light that barely rose above that of a single candle. The air smelled of spices, cooking, _home_ ; spicy pepper stung at his nose, which he wrinkled, unaccustomed as he was to the scent. After all, he hadn’t been home in quite a long time. He was reminded of long summers with his mother. He shut his eyes when he realised he could no longer see her face in his mind’s eye.

A tiny man, doll-like in his features, swept into the foyer to greet them. 'Johnny,' said a voice that was more predator than prey, and could not possibly have belonged to this man. He swept Johnny into a hug, all tight and squeezing. 'I’m so glad you’re finally here. And you brought someone with you.' The doll man tilted his head Mark’s direction, bright smile turning to something a little more bemused than welcoming. 'Who is this?'

'Jaehyun’s last victim,' Johnny said, audibly endeared by the reception he’d earned himself. 'Taeyong, this is Mark. Mark, this is Taeyong. I think you two have a lot to talk about.'

Mark could feel his face pulling into something quizzical, and schooled himself into neutrality, something at which he’d never been successful. His father had always told him he was a terrible liar. 'Hi,' he greeted, offering a couple finger-wiggles. 'What does that mean? Are you going to be able to actually answer questions? Because I’ve been with Johnny since I first woke up, and he hasn’t really told me a whole lot of anything.'

Taeyong, for his part, seemed to regard Mark with an ounce of pity, and though Mark loathed that for all it was, he couldn’t say it wasn’t deserved. He was sure, by the glimpses of reflection he’d caught in taxicab windows and storefront mirrors, that he looked like the death warmed over that he truly was. 

As the three of them passed through the foyer, Mark noticed some odd things. For one, every available surface was coated in a thick layer of dust, which ran directly contrary to everything Mark could tell about this home. For another, there was a pile of shoes that, should Mark decide to stack them, would make a mountain, resting by the door. As far as he could tell, Taeyong was the only person here. He heard no other signs of life, even as they pushed deeper into the house.

Mark cast a sideways glance in Johnny’s direction, a question not quite making it out of his mouth. Johnny just shrugged, and took Mark by the wrist, his apparent tactile nature not all wasted on Taeyong’s presence, on his hugs.

It was a far longer walk than it should have been; by the time Mark collapsed into a chair in a sitting room—or was it a library? There was no gilded ladder, but there were enough books to make even the biggest collectors envious—he was out of breath. Taeyong bustled right out the door for a moment, only to return with what seemed to be a proper British tea service, replete with scones and biscuits and the like. Mark declined the tea, but tried to wash the taste of dirt from his tongue with a macaroon that was faintly flavoured with violets.

'Trust me, love,' said Taeyong, and just now Mark could hear a touch of accent in his tone not unlike that of the people he’d heard in the train station and the subsequent streets, 'you’re going to want the tea.' He spooned cream into the bottom of the dainty cup with the smallest spoon Mark had ever seen, and then poured tea atop it, drizzling the settled surface with honey before giving it a stir. 'It’ll help with the death that’s settled into your senses.'

'Have you died before?' Cut right to the chase, Mark Lee. He raised a shoulder to his ear, unaware of the concept of shame. 

'Oh, yes, many times,' Taeyong sang, taking a seat of his own. Johnny, Mark noted, did not care for the dusty, plush chairs that made an almost eerily perfect semicircle around the room. 'We all have, don’t you know? Don’t you—'

'Taeyong.' Johnny’s voice carried with it a note of warning, which was funny to Mark in the same way that everything was. 

Properly chastised, Taeyong hopped up from his seat, crossed the library, threw back the heavy curtains, thus exposing the motes in the air to sunlight and drenching them out of existence. In the light, Mark could see that his hair was all the shades of a peacock and then some, and when he turned his head just right, there was an undercurrent of lavender threaded through him. It reflected in his enormous eyes. For a moment Mark thought he might get lost in there, their gazes connected, but Taeyong had better things to do. He waved his hand in a half-circle, and the chairs rearranged themselves in a straight line, Mark’s included.

Mark toppled face-first into the thick chintz rug, where he breathed in cobwebs and breathed out suffering. His cup stayed suspended in mid-air. He hadn’t even managed to take a sip and here he was, clutching at his ribcage, the wind knocked clean from him. 

'What the fuck,' he spat, when he had somewhat regained his breath. 

'Drink your tea, dear,' Taeyong said placidly, and that doe-eyed expression he’d worn upon their arrival had been replaced by something knife-sharp and gleaming. It was almost as if the sudden exposure to the sun had done him something wicked. 'John here says I’m not allowed to tell you anything you don’t figure out for yourself, which I’m sure is a fun game for _him_ —'

'It isn’t a game, Taeyong,' Johnny all but moaned. This sounded like the argument of a married couple who’d been through it a thousand times, had the routine down pat.

Taeyong clamped his mouth shut. 'All I’m saying is, the boy could _clearly_ use some kind of help, and you’re refusing to let me help him.'

Mark decided that this was a game of question-and-answer, and tried to formulate something that made sense. What ended up creaking tiredly from his mouth was, 'What are you the god of?'

Taeyong’s mouth cracked into the brightest and loveliest grin Mark had seen in ages. 'That’s a funny little way of putting it.' His ‘t’s were so crisp Mark wanted to dip them in his tea. 'My responsibility is taking care of others.'

'Even me?' Mark wanted to be flattered, but he had gone to France alone (he thought, though the memories of even a few days ago were quickly becoming a colourful, soundless haze to him), and did not need anyone to look after him. He traced the shape of a rose in the carpet fibers, not quite ready to pick himself up off the floor. 

'Even you,' Taeyong confirmed. 'You’re not a fan of that, and I understand. I don’t like it either.'

That brought a smile that matched Taeyong’s to his face. 'Sorry.'

'Doesn’t offend me a bit. You have another question?' Taeyong sank into a chair of his own, leaving Johnny to come to Mark’s side, and offer him his cup of tea.

It was true that it erased the floral taste from his mouth. Mark marveled down at the leaves that were only barely visible through the foggy liquid, gathering like bones rolling down into the bottom of an open grave. 'Do you take care of humans? Gods? Everyone in-between?'

'Depends on what’s needed. I’m taking care of you, aren’t I?'

'How do you know Jaehyun?'

Everything bright and wonderful about Taeyong died in that moment. 'He took someone very important from me, a very long time ago.' He cleared his throat softly. 'My son, in a manner of speaking. Made him bigger than he was. Made him greedy for things none of us are supposed to have.'

'How?'

'If I could tell you that, he’d be out of our hair, and my ward would be back with me.' Taeyong sniffed, a low, indignant sound. 'But I don’t know, and none of the rest of us have figured it out just yet, so I’m stuck here wondering.' He paused, crossing one knee over the other. 'How did he kill you? Was it the flowers again?'

This memory, Mark drew forth with startling clarity. 'We met at a club,' he started, voice low in his shyness. 'We danced a little. We drank a lot. I remember…' He squinted against the light, which was suddenly too bright for his eyes to bear. 'I remember he kept coughing. And something...something came out of him?' The struggle for the words became muddier, as if he were trying to climb up a wet hill and coming up short, fingers too short, too ineffectual to give him any purchase. 'Blood. Flowers. Both.'

Taeyong nodded sympathetically, gesturing in a vague way for Mark to continue.

'When I woke up the next morning,' Mark tried again, 'he tucked a flower behind my ear, and kissed the end of my nose. He smelled...wrong. Like something had died in the room, but the something was him. He told me I was his best friend, and I couldn’t remember agreeing to help him, but he thanked me for all my assistance.' His voice wavered toward the end, cracked. He raised the back of his unoccupied hand to his face, as if that would do anything to hide him. 'I never left that apartment again, not until John found me. The furniture disappeared into nothing, and for a second I thought I was going crazy because it seemed like it had never been there at all. He tied me up, and fed me whenever I was hungry. He listened to me cry and told me everything would be okay, and thanked me over and over again—he was _so_ grateful. And then…' The end of the sentence was bitter at the base of his tongue. 'He grew flowers inside of me.' 

Johnny had averted his eyes, though whether that was for Mark’s privacy or because he couldn’t look his mistakes in the face, Mark could not tell, and did not truly want to know.

'Do you think the rest of his sacrifices woke up?' prodded Taeyong, gentle as he could though he was at this point pulling shrapnel from a wound. 'Do you think you’re lucky?'

Mark sniffled, dragged the knuckle of his middle finger over his Cupid’s bow. 'Only if I get to kill him.'

Just then, a sound echoed through the house, a crash that reminded Mark of an accident he’d once witnessed, though by now he couldn’t say when, how old or where he was. How much time had gone by? The sun still hung high in the sky outside the library window, but it felt as if days had passed since Mark had last sat down. He pushed himself to his feet, drained the cup, prodding back the sharp leaves with the protruding tip of his tongue so he didn’t swallow them. What had been in this? He thought himself smarter than taking drinks from strangers by now, but as it turned out, he hadn’t learned a thing.

At the sound, Taeyong all but jumped from his skin, but Johnny appeared...strangely calm. Like he hadn’t heard anything at all. Or like he’d planned this, somehow. With the way he withheld information, Mark couldn’t honestly say he’d be surprised if that were the case.

The stomping of thick soles disturbed the dust and the quiet. Mark drew in on himself, drying his tears with the heel of his palm. He set down his teacup on the mirrored tray. When he caught his reflection in it, he looked...older. A streak of grey shot through his hair. Was this what death did to people?

Into the library came, with the force of a hurricane, a tall man, bottle blond, lips as pink as if they’d been glossed over. He was dressed all in black, a sweeping coat brushing against the backs of his knees; the silver buttons lining its lapel glinted, glittering harshly in the sunbars that stemmed in through the windows. He ignored the shout of protest that burst from Taeyong’s throat. When he took Mark by the face, he was wild-eyed, as if he’d lost some part of his mind that might once have been precious, essential.

'My heart,' he whispered, and touched his forehead to Mark’s.

'Jungwoo, wait—' But now, Johnny was disturbed, reaching out a hand as if to forcibly separate them too.

It was too late. Mark felt his head whirring, like something mechanical inside his new, undead brain had clicked into place and started to function. He saw flashes of this same man, darker hair and brighter eyes, a ring upon his finger, the two of them under a canopy bed entwined, the two of them counting stars with wine on their breath, this man Jungwoo offering him a curling bouquet wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with twine—

And then he saw nothing at all, and felt only his knees giving out beneath him. The roses that rose up to greet his crashing end were lovely, and cushioned his cheek as black shot, bullet-precise, through his vision.

\---

When Jaehyun next stepped into the dim sun that occupied the earth, he took a deep breath and coughed. The inside of his elbow was painted crimson. He held it up to a clear, blue sky, and wondered where he was. Why he couldn’t be like John, who could find anything and anyone he needed with a blink. 

Right now, Jaehyun needed, and it was so desperate a desire to get back to that beach, to get back to Donghyuck, that when he coughed again he forgot to tuck the flower petals into his pocket for his next victim. 

Beyond him, he heard the distant sound of a train. He asked around in his best English, marred by the thick coating of pollen that adhered the inside of his mouth. As it turned out, he was in Vienna, which explained the garbling of tones that he took far too long to decipher.

Cursing his inability to travel, he tried to picture Donghyuck’s face in his mind. Their long hair curling around their temples. The sound of their voice, sweet as it had been, sickly as it had denied him. He had missed his charge so dearly, and to be torn from them again—

Jaehyun put the thought from his mind, and focused instead on destination. It was only one sacrifice, he reasoned. Only one more life. 

Above him, the moon crested, the stars twinkling out some mirthless laugh meant to mock him. He had left his shoes and jacket back on the beach; now, in his vest, with his toes still crusted in sand, he felt...naked, somehow. As if he had left some portion of his identity in that other world.

The streets were busy, and the gentle din of conversation drew him this way and that. If only he could find some help. His English got him far enough, but people were here having parties, or had places to go that had nothing to do with some foreign accent in a wrinkled dress shirt. 

At long last someone kind fixed their eyes upon him. A lovely girl, dark hair tied back, ribbons around her ponytails, face paint neon bright beneath shining, street-lit eyes. She flouted in an airy white dress and looked like one of the saints these humans were trying so hard to make believable. Her eyes reminded him of Donghyuck’s, of their benevolence, many eons ago when they had first met, before they had bothered with things like lifetimes and fixed forms.

'Where’re you trying to go?' asked the girl in question. She slipped her hand into Jaehyun’s, lifted the both of their clasped palms in a gesture that resembled prayer. 

'London, I think,' he said, almost too soft to be detected. He looked down at his bare feet, how pitiful they looked against the gum-stuck sidewalk. 'But anywhere would be good. You wouldn’t be able to find me some shoes? Someone stole mine, and,' but here, he interrupted himself, coughed something fierce into the curve of his own shoulder. 

His lips came away flecked with blood, with rust-coloured flower petals, weeping with age. She let out a surprised little sound, and shuffled away from him, disappearing into the throng of bodies that made the city move, teeming with sounds he could not decipher. 

Jaehyun did not stop coughing until he was sure his lungs would butterfly from his mouth, dripping and viscous, and when his knees hit the concrete beneath he tried to scream. No sound left him, save that horrible retching. Between his splayed hands spread a wealth of blood-sticky flower petals, poison all the way up.

\---

As he slept, the near-coma he’d been put into by some stranger named Jungwoo dragging him into an infinitely layered darkness of purples and sickly greens, Mark dreamed.

In his dream, he was something intangible, a beam of light pressing down upon the earth, a gaze between impassioned lovers on the brink of destruction, a cry on the lips of a firstborn daughter. The bridge of his nose was freckled, he smelled of damp forest floors, and he always tasted bitter coffee at the tip of his tongue, no matter how much air he drew into himself. ‘Here’ was the side of a low mountain, tiny blue and purple wildflowers scattered among thickets of green that spread downward like the thirsting roots of a tree reaching for the moisture buried deep. 

Here, the sun shone brilliant on his face, and he was not alone.

There were no hands in his, because he had no form of which to speak, but he could feel a presence inside him just the same.

Curious, how he saw no humans around, but he could feel breath upon him, a heart thrumming in perfect time with his own.

He gazed out onto a river passing between this mountain and the next, and the sound of rushing water filled his ears. Mark blinked. When he opened his eyes, a split second later, he was in a city the likes of which he had never seen.

The air choked thick with ash that clung to his eyelashes, and filled the mouths of children as they ran screaming from what seemed the city center. In the distance he could hear pained moaning, and a set of fingers slipped into his, squeezing his bony knuckles until a sharp pain shot up into his wrist.

He, too, cried out, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the despair that came rolling out into the streets in dusty clouds. 

When he blinked again, Mark found himself atop a lighthouse, staring out at the sea as countless boats seemed to row themselves to shore. His hands held steady on the base of an Argand lamp, which should have burned his palms, but only warmed him to his core. He could hear the distant chanting of oars’ strokes over the crash of the sea far below him.

He watched, breath held taut, waiting for something wicked to happen. When the sun rose hazy purple upon the horizon he finally abandoned his post, only pausing to make sure the fire was intact. It would last until he came back.

His feet, lighter than he recalled, carried him down a stone staircase, spiraling into the base of the lighthouse. Just beside was home, though he had not lived here in what felt like centuries. He burst in through the heavy wooden door, and was greeted with a shriek, with arms rung around his neck, with kisses splattering all over his face, messy and wild.

Before him stood a dark-haired man, kind eyes, a sharp smile, dressed in all black with matching charcoal smudged along the apple of his cheek. Mark raised a hand around the embrace still holding him in place, tried to dab away the offending smear, but it was to no avail. 'My heart,' sang the man, kissing the corner of Mark’s mouth and squeezing him tight. 'It has been so long since you’ve been home.'

Mark stiffened, but then melted into the touch, eyes fluttering shut. This, he thought, was home.

When he lifted his eyes, glanced over the shoulder of the man he remembered but did not _know_ , he saw something that had his heart dipping into his stomach. Between the walls of the decrepit kitchen, overflowing with dishes that had not seen cleanliness in what he knew to be years, dead plants and drying spices, Mark could see the threads stretching from window to wall. 'What is that?' he asked, dismayed, pushing out of the hold that had pinned him to the floor. He crossed the tiny house, and when he reached the cat’s cradle, he dragged his pinched fingertips along one of the lengths of yarn, pinned to a particular spot on the atlas. The thread led all the way out the open window, and it fluttered in the breeze as the thin curtains did. Its other end could not be seen from here.

'Work,' said the man simply, coming from behind to hook his chin over Mark’s shoulder, breath brushing against his ear. 'Nothing you have to worry about. Have you seen Johnny lately?'

Mark blinked. His mind was still of the present, in some respect; hearing Johnny’s name in this context reminded him of ham and butter, of taxicabs better left escaped, of the fact that this was a dream and nothing more. Fingers slid around his waist, finding the bones of his hips. The breath upon the shell of his ear turned hot, and the tip of a tongue traced his helix. He leaned into it, and his eyes fell shut again, his slack mouth letting out a pathetically needy sound. After all, he had not seen home in forever.

It was then that he felt a fork in the tongue as it swirled along the curve of his earlobe. Mark turned, slowly, in the arms that encased him.

The eyes were no longer kind, the comforting earthen shade that recalled shorelines and overgrown willows having turned jet black, gaping maws where eyeballs must once have been. He shouted, and pushed away.

The man smiled, huge and wicked, and his jaw opened with a _crack_ that pierced through the sound of waves crashing again, again, again upon a rocky jetty. The jawbone hung from one hinge, bleeding all the way down the pale, slender column of his neck and into the jet-black turtleneck he wore. Mark quivered to see the exposed teeth, the meat that had once been couched inside his cheek, the subtle working of a tongue getting ready to swallow.

When the man coughed, he expelled thousands upon thousands of tiny lilies, their pollen spreading in yellow streaks down the front of his shirt, bursting from between his parted fingers in enormous, toxic clouds. He breathed in the dust—how could he not, when he drew in breath to ask a question that burned inside him like the lamp some hundred feet above his head?—and his head grew dizzy, his vision spotted with black.

Those same hands that had caressed him not but a few moments before reached out and fit perfectly around his neck, sticky with pollen and thumbs digging into his windpipe.

He blinked before the scream could be blocked, trapped in his throat as he died a second time.

\---

'It was just a dream,' whispered a voice into Mark’s ear, holding him close, fingertips dragging over his crown. 'It’s okay, my heart, it was just a dream.'

The pet name made him sick to his stomach. On his tongue he tasted dirt, and coffee that had been burnt to blackening, and kisses that had never been real.

He did not remember moving to a bed in that strange house in London—he _wouldn’t_ remember, he thought, indignant as he scrubbed the heel of his palm against his temple—but here he was, wrapped in limbs and linens and having sweet nothings spoken right into his ear, so close he could feel the words resting cushioned upon his aching brain. He wriggled out of the grasp of the strange man who had crashed his pity party, the one Taeyong had accidentally started and, Mark assumed, at least _intended_ to finish.

Jungwoo. The man’s name was Jungwoo. He had no context for it, save Johnny’s scarcely uttered cry in the library. And Jungwoo was here now, cradling Mark to his chest, fingertips drumming patterns against the place where his heart beat in his chest.

When had his heart started beating again, he wondered, coughing quietly into the crook of Jungwoo’s neck. 

He was still wearing the same clothes he’d died in. The first order of business was to change that, if at all possible. If Taeyong was in the business of taking care of people (and Mark was inclined to believe that this did not only extend to kitchen duties, though he’d be surprised to find any speck of laundry in this disuse house), then he would be able to help.

Untrue. First order of business was to try and lie his way into a bath, some clean clothes. 'I’m okay,' he said, in a voice that strained, shot through with pain he couldn’t recall incurring. 'I’m okay, please let me go.'

The man wrapped around him like some sort of bear went stone-still, pulled away from him, tucked a pretty hand beneath the pillow of his cheek. 'Okay.' His tone said he did not believe what was being told him, but Mark was in the business of vengeance, not that of propitiation. 'You were screaming, in your sleep.'

'I figured that.' He sat up, the world threatening to spin out from beneath him, the same pinwheel sensation that had stricken him before coming back for a nauseating reprisal. He glanced around, anywhere but at Jungwoo’s face. He could feel the heat of being studied upon the curve of his cheek, the slope of his neck, the pulse that beat through thin skin and the mole that sat just above. He shifted, rubbed said mole with his fingertips, which ached in the same way burns from cooking did. 

Upon the bedside table were aspirin, water, the stone-cold remains of his cup of tea from the library, what appeared to be a cold compress gone soggy with being out of a refrigerator for too long, and the notepad that had once been neatly wedged into his back pocket. All of them sat on a reflective silver tray, in which Mark could see his reflection 'Taeyong brought those for you earlier,' said Jungwoo, a note of caution in the way he spoke, the way he held himself, knees drawing up closer to his chest as if he were ready to kick Mark away should he need to. 'He’s such a mom. He takes good care of us, yeah, but…'

'What do you mean, _us_?' Mark felt as if he had asked this question more times in the last twenty-four hours than he had in his entire life.

'Us. Gods.'

'Are you a god?'

Jungwoo laughed, a grating sound that had Mark wincing away to the edge of the bed. He dangled sock feet over, letting his heels brush against a dusty skirt embroidered with the same colour roses that had covered the carpet in the library. 'I don’t know,' he said, 'do you think I am?'

Mark reflected on this a long while, staring down at the shabby toe hole in his sock. He couldn’t remember shucking himself of his shoes, and wondered who’d taken care of him when he’d collapsed. 'Maybe.' He shrugged, because indifference seemed the safest thing to do around this man who knew all his secrets before he spoke them, who had kissed their foreheads together to create a violence that Mark had thought dying would allow him to leave behind. 'I think it probably doesn’t matter if you are or you aren’t.'

'And why do you think that?' When Jungwoo slithered up behind him, hands fitting around his waist and breath against his ear, Mark shivered. It was too like the dream. 'What do you think gods can do that humans can’t?'

'Johnny can find anything.' He paused to wet his lips, then plucked the glass of water from the bedside table to sip at it daintily. 'Taeyong can make teacups float.'

'What can you do?'

'I can…' He silenced himself again with thought. Jungwoo’s fingers pressed into the soft skin of his sides, trying to squeeze an answer from him, but one couldn’t wring blood from a turnip. 'I can survive death.' It hit him all at once, and he wilted with it, slumping over at the realisation that Jaehyun’s ritual had not taken him out as intended. 'I can’t die.'

'That’s what you _can’t_ do.' Jungwoo’s voice was low, careful, trained not to betray some answer that he must have known Mark was seeking. 'Tell me what you _can_ do.' His lips were so, so close to Mark’s nape, that the edges of him brushed thin, tender skin. 

From the other room, Mark heard a shout; whether it was triumph or anguish, he couldn’t distinguish, so he shoved out of the hands on his waist, ignoring the petulant whine he received in recompense for his actions.

The yelling came from down a hallway Mark couldn’t remember traversing. He traced the path from the bedroom he’d come from to a kitchen, bright and open so that it refracted upon dancing dust in the air. Johnny was sitting at an enormous oak table, eyes closed, finger upon a spot on an atlas wide enough to hang off the table’s edges like some sort of geographical tablecloth. 'Good morning, Mark,' said Taeyong, from off to the side. He shuffled close enough that Mark could smell tea leaves and milk upon his skin, and it was comforting in a way that he shouldn’t have felt. 'We’ve just figured out where your nemesis is.'

Mark glanced from Taeyong’s enormous eyes, to the place where Johnny held his hand steady. His wrist was a crooked one-hundred-twenty degrees, and looked as if it must hurt, though, Mark supposed, it was harder to hurt a god then just a little bit of wrist strain. His fingers tiptoed back and forth across the western coast of Australia, keeping pace with the movement of a human being. 'He’s in a vehicle, I think?' Johnny said, too calm, voice deep and rough with sleep. Mark took note of the fact that he was in pyjamas, that Taeyong’s set was coordinated to Johnny’s but not quite matching, inverse of the blue-and-yellow that patterned Johnny’s shoulders. 'He’s going south. He might jump into the sea.' He barked out a laugh. 'Wouldn’t that be funny, if he just fucking… _drowned himself_ , after all our hard work.'

Jungwoo, too, padded from the room where he and Mark had been sleeping side-by-side. He ignored whatever the conversation was, went to a drawer on the far side of the kitchen, started pulling things from it and throwing them on the floor. 'Darling,' Taeyong said, imploring, 'you know I would do anything for you, right, but you can’t just undo all my hard organisation, it’s rude.'

Jungwoo gave no answer. When he turned he held aloft a ball of twine, dusty like everything else in this house, fraying. 'He’s going to do something,' said a voice that definitely wasn’t the one that had nested, cosy, in Mark’s ear not but a few moments ago. Already Jungwoo’s fingers were unspooling the string, and the string was becoming something else beneath his touch, silvery and thrumming like an instrument as he wrapped one end around his wrist.

'No, not this,' Johnny said softly, having finally opened his eyes to observe. 'Jungwoo, if you turn our kitchen into a board for one of your visions, I’ll—' And his voice rose, like he meant to threaten, but Taeyong stilled him with a hand upon his shoulder, fingertips that dug into the uppermost arch of his clavicle.

'Let him work,' Mark insisted, so quietly insistent. He did not know where the determination came from. Nor did he understand where the notion of ‘work’ had come from; Jungwoo was a stranger to him, albeit one that cuddled too close for his liking.

He watched as Jungwoo tied a loop in the twine around the handle of a cabinet, then led the string to the windowsill. There he made a much larger lasso around a heavy earthen plant that had seen more verdant days, judging by the heavy sulk of its yellow stems and leaves upon the dirty sill. When this line was tied off, Jungwoo built another in its precise center, and tied that one to the leg of the table, pushing the atlas from its spot and banging his knuckle noisily upon wrought iron that supported all of it, Johnny’s elbows included. He hummed as he worked, a song that Mark thought he found familiar, as if he had heard it in some dream he’d had as a child. Another string here, another there, until the kitchen had become a spiderweb, and the three men remaining its flies. 

Jungwoo found a spot that seemed near the epicenter of the threads that wound around one another. Then he pulled it apart, fraying it between his fingers.

‘What are you doing,’ muttered Taeyong darkly, making no attempt to hide his disdain. 

In answer, Jungwoo only kept humming his song, occasionally giving it words, _timber_ here, _silver_ there, _exceptional_ one that caught in Mark’s throat like a flower might have once upon a time.

‘I’m removing all the false memories,’ Jungwoo said at last, the wildness in his eyes something to behold. His hair had become a mess in his frenzied movement, the clothes he wore wrinkling. Mark shuffled into the doorway to the kitchen through which the two of them had entered, giving space to whatever this was, knowing deep down it was grander than he was.

His head split. He needed coffee, or water, or more sleep, and could not decide which. But he still watched, paralysed, as Jungwoo frayed threads here and there.

‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Johnny, tilting his head, jaw set in a carefully stern way. ‘We could just talk about it.’

‘And do what? Explain it? Do humans ever believe us?’ Jungwoo’s tone, by contrast, was featherlight. Threads turned golden, then burnt-black, under his touch, falling to ash in Taeyong’s kitchen. Mark restrained a laugh, watching the way Taeyong’s eyebrow twitched, most likely at the inconvenience of having to clean up after someone else’s mess. ‘You two just sit around and have conversations like it makes anything easier, when you could take the shell of the human around the spirit and make it something else entirely.’

Mark did laugh now, shoulders bunching around his ears. No longer did the kitchen smell of herbs and spices and a warmth he could not explain; now it was filling quickly with rot and decay, with winter cold that it froze bodies so they did not decompose. He shivered with bones that seemed to rattle together in his ears, a xylophone to which no one else could sing.

As Jungwoo pulled at thread after thread, Mark was forced to wonder what it was that made him feel light, impermanent. He thought of his dream, of a monster with pits for eyes and arms around him and endless, endless teeth.

‘Taeyong, do you have a match?’ Jungwoo was nothing if not professionally kind.

A moment of floundering passed before Taeyong rifled through the drawers. ‘This is a bad idea,’ he said in warning tone, offering the box Jungwoo’s way.

Ignoring him as he had all this time—could he hear? To what frequency was he tuned that he could play static over every protest thrust his way? Mark, fascinated, beheld him now, the beauty of his raven hair, the softness of his eyes, the determination and confidence of his movements—Jungwoo struck a match on the side of the box. He held the flaming tip to a thread, the first branch off the original, and watched it fall away with glee in his eyes, a mischief that denied everything Mark had noted about him until now.

He suffused with warmth, Mark was, and he sat down, starting to burn as the fire did. Every centimetre of his skin tingled, then went up in flames, and he found himself thinking of phoenixes, catching fire to be reborn. When he glanced down at his hands, his veins were black, stark in their contrast against pale, ash-grey skin. He tasted dirt at the back of his tongue, and he swore he could see flowers beginning to bud up from beneath his skin. He was brush, and he would burn everything here. 

Here, shaking on Taeyong’s kitchen floor, he stared up into the web of threads that comprised him, his memories, and wondered why he’d ever thought himself _this_. His body ceased to be his own. His veins flooded through with heat his mortal brain did not comprehend. Head thrown back, he screamed, a curse that he could not translate.

Jungwoo rushed to his side. Instead of stooping as someone who cared might he stood above Mark, grinning. ‘Finally,’ Mark thought he said. The incessant whirring in his head left him unable to comprehend how someone could be so calm when he was threatening to become ash before them. If Jungwoo cared for him, why was he not helping?

Johnny and Taeyong, knowing everything, merely glanced away, politeness the only real thing that they could offer. ‘I told you this was a bad idea,’ Taeyong’s whisper came, louder than anything Mark had heard in his life.

But then, he remembered, and the lifetimes upon lifetimes were layering over him, his head filling with images to which Mark Lee could have never borne witness. He saw a lighthouse.

A second scream ripped from him, threatening to split his ribcage apart, show off the seams of his skin as they split, earthen and dry and quaking. He shivered, fever tearing out from beneath his heart as it slowly came to beat again, then raced, then pummeled its way out of aortic grip.

‘Jungwoo, _stop_ ,’ Mark thought he heard, but whose voice it was he could not tell as his body rearranged itself into starlight. Then he saw black again, and was a human no more.

\---

Jungwoo was the one to carry Mark over his shoulders. ‘He’ll be fine,’ he promised Johnny and Taeyong, an arm around his own, Mark’s weight nothing but a feather to him as he headed back toward the bedroom from where they’d come.

Johnny did not buy this for a moment, and followed close behind, afraid that his best friend would somehow be abused by sharp corners, by a time god’s uncareful hands. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he insisted, voice a low rumble, warning. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. We tried to warn you, that we were easing him into it, that—’

Like a clock, or a bomb, Jungwoo ticked out his displeasure with the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth. ‘What would he have wanted, if he had known?’ he asked. ‘What would you have wanted? To have the skin pulled from your bones as we unwound you?’

Taeyong, from Johnny’s right shoulder, fixed Jungwoo with something like hatred. ‘You know that isn’t fair,’ he insisted. His hand fit into Johnny’s, like Jungwoo was just supposed to ignore them teaming up against him. ‘He could have died—’

At this Jungwoo let out a long, mirthless laugh that echoed off cobwebbed hallway walls. ‘If Jaehyun couldn’t kill him, what makes you think I could?’ They reached their destination, Mark’s weight still sagging against him, an unconscious arm curling around his waist. ‘Leave us until he wakes. He will need time to recover, and all the two of you _lovebirds_ —’ he buried every ounce of his contempt in the word, seeded and waiting to grow into what their relationship had always been, Mark’s near-death notwithstanding, ‘need to do is stop trying to undermine me.’ He sniffed, further disdain clear in the set of his jaw. ‘We talked about this, before he took his break. You not doing your job,’ he indicated Johnny with a jut of his chin, ‘is not my responsibility.’

They lingered outside the door long after Jungwoo slammed it in their faces. For all that they were supposed to be clockwork pieces, working in flawless tandem toward one end goal, he certainly could not stand the nosiness with which they appointed themselves. Couples, he supposed, draping Mark carefully across the mattress and wrapping the heavy duvet around him. ‘You always get cold,’ he told Mark’s sleeping form, watching the careful rise and fall of his chest, a leftover reflex for when his body was still a body, and not the magnificent thing it had become thanks to Jungwoo’s interference. ‘You’ll be okay, my heart.’ Here, he dusted lips along the line of Mark’s brow, and lay next to him, an arm across his middle to feel his inhales slow, eventually stop.

He coughed in his sleep. A speck of dirt rest against the pillow. He was not even entirely _fixed_. Jungwoo found himself half-tempted to go give the ones in charge of Mark’s care, post-mortem, a piece of his mind. The mental image brought a giggle to his lips. Leave it to Taeyong to lose another ward.

However, he could not bear further separation from Mark, and so he stayed there, forehead in the crook of Mark’s neck.

‘I wonder what you’re dreaming of,’ he said softly, against the ridge of Mark’s collarbone. ‘If you dreamed of me before I woke you up.’

Hours passed. Days. Jungwoo kept himself busy by trying his best to stay still. It was in his bones to keep moving—time stopped for no man, after all, no matter how human or inhuman they had become over centuries’ passage—but he remained there, a tree whose roots were buried in Mark’s well-being. Every so often he shifted, the ache in ephemeral bones settling in, and when he did he brushed kisses upon Mark’s temple, his cheek, the crooked tip of his ear.

‘Wake up soon,’ he whispered once, when night had overtaken and the streetlights outside the enchanted home flickered in through the window. ‘We don’t have much time left, and I can’t make it stop.’ There was a note of fear that crept into his voice, but he did not claim it. Instead he clutched at Mark’s shirt, until his bloodless knuckles turned pink, until he could let sleep claim him too, insomnia a poor companion when the love of one’s life was lying right beside them.

\---

Jaehyun found that moving was simpler than it seemed at the outset. Despite having awoken in the southern hemisphere, it was an easy matter to take the place of a passenger on the way to the European beaches, to bind them and steal their documents for safe passage. This world was so lacking in attention, after all.

He fell asleep several times on the plane, and in all his dreams he had grown wings, taken to the skies, intent on finding the one happiness that eluded him. Each time, he woke before he could reach out to the sunspot that brightened the beaches, the mountains’ snowy apexes, the valleys in which nothing could live but that which never had in the first place. Each time, his hand was curled into a grasping fist when he gasped back into the waking world, as if he had clutched at feathers that had disintegrated before he opened his eyes.

Now, a full day later, he was trying to peer up into the orangine skyline, dotted with grey clouds that threatened a rain to which he did not look forward. The waves rocked against the beach, growing choppier with passing minutes. This stretch of beach was private, hidden by cliffs that he had been forced to hoist himself over, his upper body spasming with the coughs that wracked through him, pertussic and painful. Here and there the sandstone was dotted with blood, drying from red to brown, and flecked in fluttering lily petals, pollen deposits that halfway blew away in the pre-rain wind.

Here, at the shoreline, Jaehyun watched the waves roll in, lounging upon a stolen towel he’d found on his barefoot trek, his soiled dress shirt having been lost somewhere among the rocks he’d scaled to find this place. He dug the heels of his palms into the damp sand, feeling the grains dry out beneath his touch, enjoying the way they dug into his nails. Here, in this pocket of beach, he was safe from the questioning eyes of others, from the intentions to save whatever he intended to kill.

Every so often, he raised his arm to cough, face buried in the crook of his elbow and blood spattering upon the veins there. It would seem to anyone who happened by that he was waiting for something, that even as the sun set anything could happen as long as he willed it into being.

_you know they aren’t going to like what you’re doing._

Donghyuck’s voice taunted him, even now as they were as far apart as two people could be. 

'You’d like it here,' he said aloud, just to hear the contempt laced in his hallucination’s voice when they spat back.

_i would like it nowhere with you, if all you plan to do is disappoint me._

Donghyuck hating him was better than the disacknowledgment, to Jaehyun. It was better than the disappearing act that had sent him back to this world. It was better than screwing up so entirely that his love would have nothing to do with him.

He heard the faint scrabbling of nails upon the rock, and twirled a little burlap bag of flowers between his fingers, waiting for whoever intruded upon him to come closer, that he might finally get what it was he wanted. By now he could taste sunshine on his breath, and home was so close he could reach out and take it, if not by peaceable means then by bloodier ones.

\---

It was the middle of the night when Mark’s breath came back to him at last. He’d been out cold, unblooming despite the moonlight, so exhausted that he couldn’t even feel himself losing oxygen, his lips blueing for him to die a second time. His head had barely been able to wrap around the burning, and now his skin was no longer who he was—a visage, one without meaning, whose only purpose was that of making the humans they might run into comfortable.

His lungs filled with air, and he tasted no dirt, only the sweet scent of flowers whose names he could not recall. He tried to think of who he had been, before falling asleep again, before Jungwoo had kissed their foreheads and reminded him of who he was, before Taeyong had looked after him and protected him from learning everything all at once, before Johnny had found him limp and lifeless on the floor of that apartment—and found he could not remember the contours of his own face.

It was peaceful, the forgetting. Mark found himself grateful for it, heart swelling, lotus blossoms upon a still lake.

He cracked one eye open, peered out the window into the inky blackness of sky, starless and uninterrupted. An arm curled around his waist, warm and inviting, reminding him of the things he had left undone in his last life. Mark turned in the hold around him and pressed foreheads together. “Hello,” he said softly, a voice that both did and did not belong to him.

Jungwoo blinked at him, guileless, a warm smile spreading across his face. “Hello, my heart,” he echoed, lips barely moving, mouth full of cotton that was made of dreams. Did gods dream? Mark couldn’t recall dreaming this time, either, though he could still faintly remember the nightmare that had spurred Jungwoo into changing his life, peeling away the outside of him to reveal the true self beneath.

He brushed dark fringe away from Jungwoo’s forehead with a tender fingertip, tracing the line of his brow. It was different, seeing him now, able to recall the centuries upon centuries they’d spent together, gazing out at the unchanging sea. Jungwoo caught the tip of Mark’s finger between his lips, when he dropped his hand, his expression unchanging, that same innocence in his stare.

‘I love you,’ he said around skin that filled his mouth, cinnamon and clove and everything that had kept them safe over the years. His tongue dragged over remnant salt and sweat when he spoke, muffled, carefree. ‘Do you regret coming back?’

And Mark tried his best to remember the person he’d been before, another time, to no avail. He shook his head, and tucked them both together.

As they kissed, mouths meeting, melding, mountains quaking beneath their long-awaited contact, Mark made himself stop thinking of all the things they had to do, of the deaths that would follow them, of Jaehyun stuffing a gag into his mouth, unaware of who he was. The humanity that had been his mortal skin had masked him away, armoured him from harm while he took a break from being responsible for life and death and every experience in-between. Jungwoo had simply purified him, brought him back. He longed for that peace he had found in this starting over as he raked his fingers beneath the hem of Jungwoo’s shirt, he still dressed in the turtleneck that had been upon him when first they laid eyes on one another after fifteen years. ‘My heart,’ sighed Jungwoo into Mark’s mouth when their hips met, when they rutted against one another like new gods plucked from the stars and placed upon the earth for the sole purpose of keeping her safe and warm and welcoming for the humans soon to follow.

Sticky and somewhat sated they collapsed back, messes between them, murder in their hearts. Mark had not been complete, as a human; he had not been tied together the way he was meant to be, but now Jungwoo’s fingers had re-knotted him into the being he should have been all the while.

It was enough, he thought, to forget why he’d wanted to take that break in the first place.

Somewhere in the house, he heard singing, a low voice, rumbling through the flat’s underbelly and coming up smooth to Mark’s ears. ‘Who is that?’ he asked, not recognising the tone. 

‘Taeyong,’ said Jungwoo with a snort, rolling away too soon and leaving a cold spot in the bed where he’d been a moment ago. ‘They must have found Jaehyun.’

Mark gazed up at the infinitely high ceiling of the bedroom that had, however temporarily, become home, and allowed himself to feel what it was like not to need to breathe. When at last he forced himself vertical, there were scorch marks left in the sheets.

Jungwoo pressed their heads together and laughed.

\---

Taeyong refused to come with them, when they departed for the south. ‘My place is here,’ he said in that lilt that made Mark angry, if he was being honest with himself. Lucky for him, that he got to choose where he was from, not quite towed along on the tide of someone else’s insanity, but an ancient tree, with roots and stretching toward the sun with open hands. ‘In case someone else needs taken care of.’ There was something hopeful to his tone, as if some balance might be restored that no one had defined just yet. 

Jungwoo had nothing to say about this, but then, Jungwoo had scarcely spoken a word to either Taeyong or Johnny since enacting the ritual that had awoken Mark from deep inside himself. Instead he shuffled behind Mark, hands around his wrists and breath against his ear, his touch soothing to Mark’s fever-hot skin. He still burned, now, even days later. ‘This is normal,’ Jungwoo had told him, kept reminding him over and over again when Mark drifted off into his own thoughts, uncertainty pinching between his brows. ‘This is what happens when we shed our physical forms.’

‘Don’t you have a physical form?’ he asked Jungwoo, lips pursing into something resembling a whistle-to-be. ‘I can touch you, I can—’

In answer, Jungwoo shifted, pressed an ice cold finger against, and then through, the bone of Mark’s wrist. ‘I can be whatever I need to be in any situation,’ he said, smile holding a secret that he left there between their mouths when they finally met. ‘I can be your heart. You can be mine. That’s the important part.’

Mark took it at face value, as he couldn’t really do much else, still coming to the way a sleeping babe did in the warm, early light of morning when their mother had yet to whisk them away. All too well he knew that he was in for that rude awakening, and that it would only get worse when Johnny shepherded them onto a train, a bus, a plane, and meet up with their nemesis’ quite timely end. 

‘Are you ready to go?’ Johnny lingered in the room closest to the doorway, London Fog khaki gracing his shoulders. He and Jungwoo looked a pair, huddling together and exchanging heated whispers, yin and yang bouncing between them. Mark bit his lip to keep an almost hysterical chuckle inside him.

‘We’re ready,’ said Jungwoo at last. ‘Mark,’ and here he turned on his heel, softness in his eyes that was reserved only for the god of living and dead himself, ‘what you need to do, I can try and teach you as we’re traveling. But we need you to practise, so we know you can do it, before we find Jaehyun.’

Mark gave a false start of speech, head tipping, ears going a touch red. ‘What do you…’ But he understood. He had brought himself back, without intending to do so; he would have to do the same to a human. ‘You want me to kill.’

‘A test,’ said Taeyong from the other room. He had finally replaced the scent of decay with that of chamomile and honey and cinnamon; the smoke filled the air for a while after Mark’s awakening, but did not choke, instead leaving purity wherever it went. ‘You can do this, Mark. We all know you’re capable.’

‘We’ll be picking someone up on the way,’ said Johnny as he swung open the front door, revealing sunshine and birds chirping at low volume.

Jungwoo groaned, but followed suit, toddling out the front door. He never once let Mark’s hand leave his, thumb tapping a Morse code pattern on the outside of his thumb.

‘Who are we picking up?’ asked Mark, all the more confused by the lack of contact, as if he needed the comfort. It was for Jungwoo that he stepped outside the box he had created for himself, and no one else.

‘Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to,’ said Jungwoo darkly, leading them down the street.

They met with the cab a block away, safe from view of Taeyong’s home, its wide-eye windows gazing down upon them. Mark wondered if they caught their car close enough to the house Taeyong would be tempted to come with them, and if he would feel the same after forcing himself to sequester away, waiting for people who never visited.  


**Author's Note:**

> as always:  
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/appiarian)


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